The Rev. Kevin O'Rourke, 1927- 2012

Catholic bioethicist no stranger to controversy

April 03, 2012|By Graydon Megan, Special to the Tribune

The Rev. Kevin O’Rourke (HANDOUT)

The Rev. Kevin O'Rourke was a leading Roman Catholic scholar on ethics in health care whose stands were sometimes controversial but always, he believed, rooted in the church's distinction between ordinary and extraordinary care.

"Kevin, being traditional, was trying to uphold the tradition of church teaching in this area," said Mark Kuczewski, director of the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine in Maywood. The Rev. O'Rourke had been a lecturer at the institute since 2000, addressing questions of medical ethics with medical students and practicing physicians.

"He was focused very much on clinical care — the relationship between the patient and doctor," Kuczewski said.

The Rev. O'Rourke, 85, died of natural causes Wednesday, March 28, in Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, according to the Rev. Charles Bouchard, provincial of the Dominican Friars based in Chicago. He was a member of the Dominican order and had lived at St. Vincent Ferrer in River Forest for a number of years.

The Rev. O'Rourke was seen as either a conservative or a liberal, depending on shifting political winds and the eye of the beholder.

"People would view him sometimes as an archconservative," said James DuBois, who worked with him at what is now the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at St. Louis University. "But some thought he was liberal because he did challenge some of the more recent teachings coming out of the Vatican."

His courage and forthrightness often put him in the center of controversy, perhaps never more than in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state who died in 2005 after her husband had her feeding tube removed following a lengthy legal battle.

The Rev. O'Rourke had argued that there were moral grounds for removing a profoundly disabled person's feeding tube. He believed that if the treatment was burdensome and wasn't of benefit to the patient, it could be ended, according to Kuczewski. For patients unable to speak, a surrogate must make that decision.

In the Schiavo case and other end-of-life cases, the Rev. O'Rourke opposed what Kuczewski called "creeping vitalism" — the idea that life should be extended at all costs.

While his positions on end-of-life issues seemed liberal to some, the Rev. O'Rourke was a strong defender of the church's traditional stands on abortion and contraception. In either case, he could present his views without making enemies.

"Father Kevin could respect people and be friends with them and still disagree with them on these theological points," Kuczewski said, calling him "a tremendous personality, a big Irishman with a booming voice."

The Rev. O'Rourke, who took the name Kevin when he was ordained as a Dominican, was born David O'Rourke in Park Ridge. He attended Fenwick High School in Oak Park, served in the Navy and spent two years at Notre Dame University before entering the Dominican order in 1947.

He was ordained in 1954 and then received a degree in canon law fromSt. Thomas Universityin Rome in 1958. He began his career as an academic bioethicist in 1958 with the Aquinas Institute of Philosophy and Theology in Dubuque, Iowa, and was dean of the institution from 1969 to 1972.

He worked for the Catholic Hospital Association of the United States for several years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision raised fears that Catholic health care providers would be required to offer abortion services. That never happened, and in 1979 he became the founding director of what is now the Albert Gnaegi Center in St. Louis.

The Rev. O'Rourke earned the respect of people from different faiths and traditions while defending what he thought was true to Catholic tradition, DuBois said.

"So often Catholic health care is viewed as distinctive because of what it prohibits," DuBois said. "But for Kevin it was also about positive commitments — for example, caring for the poor and marginalized and working for universal access to health care."

In 2000, the Rev. O'Rourke came to Loyola's Neiswanger Institute, where he continued to focus on what Kuczewski called "the hot button issues that have arisen around the end of life."

He was the author of more than 100 scholarly articles on issues including genetic testing, surrogate decision making and physician-assisted suicide as well as textbooks on health care ethics.

"His big contribution is that he helped all of us — Catholic or not — think about the important issues of end of life and health care," Bouchard said. "Rev. O'Rourke really helped us as a church and as a society think about that."

The Rev. O'Rourke leaves no immediate survivors.

Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Tuesday in St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church, 1530 Jackson Ave., River Forest.